STORY BY PETER GENOVESE/THE STAR-LEDGERPHOTO BY SARAH SIMONIS/FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

Dee Licious is hungry tonight.

The blond-haired skater -- in fishnet stockings, gold shorts, black-and-white leggings and red skates -- shouts encouragement to Predator-in-Chief, Ova Dose and the rest of her Morristown Madams teammates in a roller derby bout against the Long Island Roller Rebels.

The 5-foot-5 competitor is hungry for action, hungry for bone-rattling hits, hungry for the adrenaline rush that is women's roller derby.

"Come on guys, speed it up!" Dee Licious yells as she duct-tapes her knee pads. Dee Licious -- her real name is the somewhat less colorful Chris Manzella -- is owner and co-founder of the Morristown Madams, one of seven women's roller derby leagues in New Jersey. Madams, they are not, at least on the rink.

Not with all the tumbles they take, the bumps, bruises, and broken bones they suffer.

Not with names such as Assault Shaker, Serial Jiller and Muscles Marinara.

Spectators are advised not to sit in the front row of seats -- known as Suicide Row -- because skaters often plow into them. Smaller skaters like Manzella try to steer clear of the bigger skaters, especially the formidably-built Captain Morgan. One fact of roller derby life: You spend a lot of time on your tush. Another: You always hurt more the next morning.

The 31-year-old Morristown resident, whose "totally schizophrenic" musical tastes range from Nora Jones to Marilyn Manson, has held a variety of jobs, including bartender at a go-go bar, where Manzella, who admits to "no fashion sense," learned makeup tips from the dancers. She has traveled to Indonesia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Mexico, Switzerland, Monte Carlo and Germany, among other places. At one point, she lived for two months in Great Britain.

"Long enough to know I wasn't marrying him," she says, smiling.

But it is the roller derby rink where Chris Manzella is most at home and most herself. She took a year off from one job to form the Morristown Madams, a self-taught education that included tax seminars and meetings with small business groups.

"If someone had told me what I was getting into, I would have gone into therapy," she says.

Sandy Bertholf, captain and co-founder of the Morristown Madams, says Manzella "puts her heart and soul" into the sport, and team.

"She works really hard promoting women in sports," adds Bertholf, who skates under the name Yula G. "She's sacrificed a lot of things getting this team up and running, a lot of time and work and energy."

A week ago, Manzella was laid off from her 9-to-5 job, as director of business development for a local ad agency, but she is anything but downcast when she relays the news at a Denville cafe.

"I went from being an engaging, fascinating person to just a statistic," she says sarcastically. "But I picked advertising. Since college, it has peaked and ebbed more times than I can shake a stick at. If I wasn't expecting this, I would be super-naive. Maybe it's time to re-invent myself. Move to Singapore. I'm single, I don't have kids, who knows?"

Who knows? It could be Chris Manzella's mantra. She has spent her life going with the flow, and against it when necessary. As a teen, she sang opera -- and played softball and soccer, and ran track. She even wanted to try out for the high school football team, but a coach dissuaded her. She now dreams about retiring to Thailand, where she would repair mopeds and open a bar.

"If I could live my life in a bathing suit or sarong," Manzella muses, "I would do it. I'd be that 80-year-old woman on the beach in a bathing suit."

A woman of many roles

She didn't come into this world without a little drama. Her mother threatened her father that she would have the baby on the living room floor if he did not shovel out the driveway; it snowed the February day Manzella was born.

Her given name is Christine Ann, a name to this day she finds "loathsome -- every Chrissy I've met is either bitchy or ditzy."

She grew up in West Orange and then Montville, where she attended the local high school. Despite the voice lessons, she was a jock from the jump -- gymnastics, soccer, softball, track.

At the University of Delaware, where she majored in criminology and psychology, her dream of working in the criminal justice system was disillusioned by the internship she served at a youth detention facility in Wilmington.

"The criminal justice system is so black and white," she explains. "I really don't think it's right to put the kid who stole diapers for his mom, who has a heroin habit, in with the kid who committed an armed robbery."

She finished her college requirements in three years, but ended up taking several more courses -- can you say ballroom dancing and ceramics? -- to stay a fourth year. Her student jobs included selling commemorative campus bricks to alums and waitressing at a bar called the Roadhouse. Summers, she "clerked and nannied and waitressed."

"I was the only person who did not see the beach," she recalls. "I had a graveyard tan."

After graduation from college, she backpacked through Europe, then returned home to work for an ad agency in Whippany. Then came a succession of jobs -- account executive for a startup firm, junior salesperson for a printing company, bartender/waitress at the Short Hills Hilton, executive producer at an ad agency in Boonton. And bartender at the go-go bar.

"It's kind of like being part of a roller derby team," she says of the latter experience. "There are a lot of girls in interesting outfits. There are a lot of spectators. You learn a lot about men working in a place like that."

Such as?

"They're very easily entertained," she says, laughing.

"My parents shudder at that period in my life," Manzella adds. "But the women I worked with were great."

She is a waitress at the Sushi Lounge in Morristown and is looking into a second job, as bartender or waitress. Despite being laid off from her 9-to-5 job, she still intends to travel this year, likely to South America. Package tours and air-conditioned buses? Not for her; she loves to explore cities by foot until her legs "fall off," and usually travels by backpack.

"Everything I need is on my back; everything else I can figure out," she says.

In December, she visited Indonesia and Singapore. "Friends were paranoid -- 'you're going to be picked up, and sold into white slavery.' It gave me time to be by myself, not have to answer 36 e-mails."

But she did bring a laptop and uploaded trip photos to her MySpace page. Manzella also writes travel columns for Blood & Thunder, a monthly women's roller derby magazine. She brought her roller skates, but wisely did not wear them in Singapore, where roller skating is prohibited.

"I called the embassy beforehand." A smile crosses her face. "Good call."

Religion? Raised Catholic, she's now a Buddhist.

"It's a way of life. It's caused me to be less fiery, more forgiving. You always think about the consequences of your actions, about how you are affecting people."

Roller derby devotion

It is three hours before the bout against the Long Island Roller Rebels, and the Madams' owner is bustling about, attending to dozens of details.

"We need someone to make up two signs," Manzella shouts. Then: "Can I borrow someone to hang the pirate flag?"

She calls herself "the maestro" of this fishnet-stockinged production. Il Bandito is events coordinator, Predator-in-Chief is in charge of public relations and Bozie Banger presides over interleague relations, while Lawless Lizzie is responsible for sponsorship and Doom Hilda oversees recruitment. Team sponsors include, not without some irony, the Morristown Ambulance Squad.

"Excuse me," one skater apologizes as she skates past. "My reputation is being ruined. I'm carrying a handbag."

Roller derby is serious business. Manzella has invested thousands of dollars in the team. The Madams have an executive board and board of directors.

"We make just enough to pay our rent, pay for the bouts and the concessions," she explains. "Right now, we're functioning cash in, cash out."

Most of the time, though, it's not so serious. Home games at the Morristown Inline Rink are followed by gatherings at Grasshopper Off the Green, next door. One roller derby tradition is for a skater to take a derby "wife" -- another skater, often your best friend on the rink. Dee Licious and skater Rogue Rage "married" last October in the rink parking lot; Bertholf -- Yula G -- acted as one of the bridesmaids. One of the highlights at the national women's roller derby convention in Las Vegas every July is a mass "wedding" ceremony.

One "vow" skaters make is to accompany each other on any ambulance trips. Chances are at some point in your derby life, you'll be on a stretcher. Manzella has suffered dislocated fingers, crushed thumbs and partial tears of her right knee, the last of which forced her to take three months off. At the two bouts her parents attended, she was carted off on a stretcher. They haven't been back since.

"They're super freaked out. They would love me to see me retire. They ask, 'When are you going to get married?' I'll probably bump into someone in an airport, spill coffee over him and marry him."

She skates well at the bout, but her team loses, 76-73. Several days later, sporting a black and blue mark on her left arm courtesy of Assault Shaker, Manzella talks about the sport.

"This is part of what defines me at this point in my life," she says. "Some people wake up in the middle of the night because they have so much anxiety. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking of a new drill. It's a stress reducer. You have a crappy day, you go to the rink and just hit people."

Where will she be 10 years from now?

"On a yacht outside the Greek Isles," she replies.

If she's not married to some guy she bumped into at the airport, or running a bar in Thailand, that is.

"If someone told me 10 years ago, I would not be married, no kids and still waitressing, I would have told them they were crazy," she says, reflective. "In the American sense, I'm not accomplished. I don't have a house, I don't own a fancy car. But if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I have lived a lot of life."